It's the end of the world as you know it – brought to you by a Gnome Mage with big balls of fire

Zero Tolerance

Do you have a 1 strike and your out, or a 3 strikes and your out policy?

Is your policy influenced by your relationship with the other player?

Is your policy influenced by your real life mood?

Does this tolerance level exist in your real life as well, or purely in WoW?

A Real World Example

My ex-wife has a zero tolerance policy with adults. Her belief is they are big enough to know better and there is no excuse for errors, not even with new experiences.

She has a slightly different attitude towards Odin. He gets 2-3 strikes before reaching zero tolerance (of anything, related or not) for the rest of the day.

Conversely, she expects unlimited forgiveness in return. She had more accidents in our car in the 1st year of driving than I have had in 24 years of driving. She has now been driving for 3 years and the car is currently at the panel beaters being repaired.

On the other hand I have a floating tolerance level. My wife can stack the car as many times as she needs, as long as she learns from the accident and preferably doesn’t make the same error twice (or maybe 3 times if I’m having a good day).

Bringing it back to WoW

Do you let the DPS die if they pull aggro once… twice.. or is it three times?

Do you let people with cold feet die in the fire that they love so much?

Preemptive intolerance

When you join or form a party or raid do you:

Demand ICC25 Gearscores?

Accept only those with Achievements for encounters well beyond what you are doing?

Analyze a character as soon as they get into the party and kick them before you start the slaughter?

Drop group the second you see the iLevel 200 character in your random instance

Drop group the moment you get Oculus/Old Kingdom/[Insert your least favorite instance here]?

Does your relationship influence any of this?

Does:

a random instance pugger get -2 strikes?

a local server pugger get -1 strike?

a friend of a friend get -0 strikes?

a guildy get +1 strike?

an ingame mate get +2 strikes?

a real life mate get +10 strikes?

a significant other get unlimited strikes?

Is there such a thing as a second chance?

Assuming you have had bad experiences with someone in the past, maybe even right now, and they have failed your zero tolerance policy, do they ever get a second chance?

Do you wait for them to apologize then put them back on the probation list?

Do you just clear the slate if enough time has gone by?

Do you accept “bonds of friendship” from other mates?

Will you drop group immediately if you encounter the same person in the future.. say a couple of months, even if you can’t remember why you put them on ignore?

Do you believe a bad player can learn and grow?

Do you believe that a bad person can before good?

Some of the best times have started as the worst

I don’t know about you, but some of my best instance runs have started looking the worst.

There was the group the other day that on the 1st wipe, I apologized, the conversation went like:

Squidly: Sorry Guys

Player b: Wait, No, don’t go please!

Squidly: lol I wasn’t dropping group I was apologising for letting us all die.

Player b:Yay!

They were a great group. Sure they were low powered and the going was a little slow, but they were nice, the run was fun and there were no more wipes.

Or there was the group where Squidly, the Resto Shaman was 2nd on the DPS (the tank being 3rd)

Bad.. well, not the best.

Worth a /kick or /ragequit? No, once again good group of people, if not players.

I don’t normally dps when I am healing, but I went down the discipline Priest route.. you know, prevent the incoming damage… in this case it was offense = defense. Hey, it was kind of fun find the right balance between dps and heals.

Your turn.. what’s your tolerance level?

What are your triggers for instant /kick, or for allowing someone back to your friends list?

Gnomer and Out!

PS: This is the post that got munched… memory being the funny thing it is, I am sure what I had already drafted was much better than this, but this is often as good as it gets 2nd time around… that’s why I have it when the WordPress Application trashes a post.. the original inspiration and flow are gone forever. Yet, I have given that stupid application about 50 strikes now…

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11 Responses

I consider myself a very patient player and willing to coach if needed. Mostly, I think, because of a couple things: I am 40 years old, married with kids and I really remember what it was like, not too long ago, when I was coming up and learning not to put Ficus Magic on the tank. Not that I need patience much, but there is the occasional HHoR run, or something, that is a wipe and drop fest. I tend to stick it out until it is done.

I really only kick or get mad if players are complete assholes, rude and cocky. Again, it doesn’t happen very often, but it has.

By and large I have been meeting some very good people lately, when I get into a pug that talks anyway. Especially on my warrior. People have been very understanding with my new tankness.

Something must be accomplished or else.
That something is ideally bosses dying and me getting loot.
But a group learning also counts. I’ll put up with learning. I won’t put up with the groups that start flame wars or which don’t respond at all in party chat. They can go fuck themselves.

I have a short memory. I have RARELY kicked someone, and would likely not remember them if I ever happened to get stuck with them again. I use my ignore list mainly for spaming assholes on /trade. One or two might be jerks I’ve pugged with, but I’m not sure.

I will check GS, but generally only after we’ve gone in a ways, and I’m bored or curious. I would never kick someone for their gear. (I’ve “vetoed” this type of kick before and will continue to do so)

If someone’s a jerk I have occasionally started a vote, and have agreed to it on a few occasions. (vote kick has been pretty rare in my runs so far)

It’s extraordinarily rare that I would vote “yes” to kick someone for their performance. (the only time I have is when the tank or healer were so completely incompetant that we couldn’t get past the first mobs without dying/etc – bad DPS has yet to be THAT bad that I would vote them out) I guess that in 5 mans, I simply don’t care enough to want to waste the time to find a replacement. I will only do 1-2 runs a day, and making it even slower by having to get new members is just noth worth the hassle.

Now, with guildies & friends of guildies, etc I will have more time to get annoyed with them. The only time I may hold a grudge is if they jerk me over, or are too rude to me. Performance is less of an issue (unless it’s consistent death causing stupidity – that gets old after a while)

When the repair bill will exceed the money to be earned, I’m done. That’s normally after 2 or 3 wipes for me.

I might stay if it is very apparent we are making progress, or it’s a waste for me to leave due to now being instance locked with there being a boss item I want to try for. RNG can be very unfriendly at times.

With Friends:

I’ll beat my head against the wall. Why? Because there is a return value.

i am tolerant probably to a fault. our guild runs tend to wipe 5, 6, even 7 times or more before we throw in the towel for the night, so i am not the only one. but i am the one sticking up for guildies who bend others the wrong way, and i never ever keep a mental tally of “X strikes and you’re out.”

BUT, i do have my limits: i once got a wsp from a young gnome mageling who needed help in the stockades, and since i wasn’t doing anything in particular at the time, i agreed. i ended up helping him get his first mount, and showing him now to kite, etc., and he started doing well.

then suddenly, every time he logged in, he’d be begging me to group up to help him get through stuff (e.g., kill everything so he could loot and level faster), and i began to dread seeing him log on. he’d constanly wsp me to tell him where he can level, and i kept telling him to do some research online, get this or that addon to help point him in the right direction, etc. it became a real drag. i asked around in the realm for a good guild match for him, but he was a young kid (early teen, i think?), and most guilds didn’t want kids as a member. he finally found a guild, but he said that they wouldn’t help him. i suspect that got tired of boosting him. anyway, i haven’t seen him on in months — i suspect he moved on to another game. but MAN, he really tested my limits of patience.

Overall I am fairly patient, and bemused at the number of people actually sporting that title in-game now who are anything but. But here’s a recent anecdote that I find relevant to this topic.

I was in one random heroic where there was a DK doing around 900 DPS. A rogue in the group called him out and basically intimated that once the “can’t kick” debuff wore off, he was going to initiate a kick, because he wasn’t going to carry the DK. The group’s healer, who was from the same realm and possibly knew the DK, spoke up for him and said he’d leave if the DK got kicked. I gave my own 2 cents, that I agreed the DPS was low but that I only vote to kick people who are actively hurting a run. And the DK was doing fine on that account–he essentially was being carried but he wasn’t making anyone have to do anything they weren’t already going to do. The rogue ended up leaving, citing his unwillingness to carry someone.

There were two things about this incident that interested me. One, I had a queer sort of admiration for both the healer _and_ rogue standing by their principles–both would have had to wait to requeue if they left, and in the rogue’s case he actually took this penalty plus the longer DPS queue time to do so. I understood the rogue but didn’t agree with him, yet I respect it when people stand by principles in defiance of self-interest.

Two, the DK was quiet through all this but in the wake of the rogue leaving his DPS did go up to about 1400, still low but close to the appropriate heroic minimum (1500 in my experience). Did the rogue’s words have an effect? And could being extremely lenient be as bad as adopting a zero tolerance policy? The rogue may have done himself a disservice by not giving the DK a chance to improve, but I perhaps do my groups a disservice by not pushing for their best performance. I’m not sure where the balance should sit.

As a relative newcomer to WoW myself, I have nearly limitless tolerance for just about any sort of behavior in a 5-man PuG, EXCEPT when it comes to rudeness. In my opinion, there is just no excuse for some of the verbal abuse and outright nastiness that sometimes goes on in PuGs. On my mage, if someone starts putting up attitude, I’ll call them out on it. On my tank, I’ll simply drop group (sometimes even in the middle of a pull, which I’ll admit is a pretty mean thing to do). Tanking is stressful enough without having to put up with abuse from your group.